ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is currently living on board the International Space Station for her long duration mission Futura. In this video Samantha shows us how she manages to cook one of her bonus food recipes in microgravity: a quinoa salad with dried tomatoes, mackerel and leek cream, all wrapped in a warm tortilla. [via TwistedSifter]

Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being The First. 'Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, “Is 100 the right number?” She would be in space for a week. “That would not be the right number,” she told them. At every turn, her difference was made clear to her. When it was announced Ride had been named to a space flight mission, her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, who became a lifelong friend and colleague, introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” At another press event, a reporter asked Ride how she would react to a problem on the shuttle: “Do you weep?”'
posted by kmz
on Jul 1, 2014 -
95 comments

Rob Meline always dreamed of being an astronaut. He became a teacher instead. But the beloved faculty member at Camas Prairie Elementary in Spanaway, Washington kept a family secret. When he fell victim to it in October 2012, he became the symbol of a flawed judicial system. What his students did next was out of this world.
posted by zarq
on Oct 4, 2013 -
43 comments

The Welsh Space Campaign. The suit is made of the fabric woven in the lastremainingwool mills in Wales. The astronaut boots are traditional Welsh clogs crafted by a traditional clog maker. The whole pressure system that will enable the astronaut to sustain life in outer space was built by a Welsh plumber.
The aim of the designer is to reveal that Wales has the capacity to explore space, and to show that off-world culturalisation can be achieved through a collective communitarian effort; as a way to allow the people involved to reconsider their role and skill in relation to these cosmic contexts. -- We Make Money Not Art
posted by Bunny Ultramod
on Jun 10, 2013 -
15 comments

Last fall, the Canadian Space Agency asked students to design a simple science experiment that could be performed in space, using items already available aboard the International Space Station. Today, Commander Chris Hadfield conducted the winner for its designers: two tenth grade students, Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner, in a live feed to their school in Fall River, Nova Scotia. And now, we finally have an answer to the age-old question, What Happens When You Wring Out A Washcloth In Space?[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 18, 2013 -
63 comments

SpaceProject from photographer Vincent Fournier.
"Playing on the stylised notion of a sci-fi utopia, Fournier’s otherworldly photographs of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile – alongside a series of surprisingly stringy trainee astronauts - offer an alternative view of the world, unseen by many and known by few."
posted by puny human
on Jul 18, 2010 -
11 comments

Astronaut Michael Collins – "I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified façade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."
posted by miss lynnster
on Jul 28, 2009 -
60 comments

Yuri's Night is more than 100 parties on the same night around the world, on every continent including Antarctica, April 12, 2002. What's to celebrate? The 41st anniversary of the suborbital flight of Yuri Gagarin, and the 21st anniversary of the first space shuttle flight, a fitting tribute to two great space milestones. Is there a party in your city? Set one up! I only read about last year's (initiated for the 40th/20th), but I'm going to try to go this year. There are, of course, even moe 40th anniversaries of significant space events to come. [tip o' the hat to Rand Simberg, who has even more provocative stuff in his FoxNews.com column -- like relocating Israel to the Moon. And he's serious.]
posted by dhartung
on Apr 4, 2002 -
9 comments

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